5 DIRECTOR S NOTES This film, which deals with the past, our relationship to our own past, and to what forms us, has a long history. One that Juliette Binoche and I implicitly share. We first met at the beginning of both our careers. Alongside André Téchiné, I had written Rendez-vous, a story filled with ghosts where, at age twenty, she had the lead role. Even then, the film looked at the Invisible and the path a young actress takes towards the attaining fulfillment in a role. Since then, our paths have run parallel, only crossing much later when we shot Summer Hours together in It was Juliette who had first had the feeling there was some missed opportunity, or rather film, that remained virtual in our shared history, and that would bring both of us back to the essential. With this same intuition in mind, I began taking notes, then breathing life into characters, and then into a story that had been waiting to exist for a long time. Writing is a path, and this one is found at dizzying heights, of time suspended between origin and becoming. It is no surprise that it inspired in me images of mountainscapes and steep trails. There needed to be Spring light, the transparency of air, and the fogs of the past, those of the Cloud Phenomena of Maloja. A path that both brought me back to where everything started, for Juliette and myself, and where we find ourselves today, in our questions about the present, and especially the future. Maria Enders is an actress. With her assistant, Valentine, they explore the wealth and complexity of characters created by Wilhelm Melchior characters who still have yet to give up all their secrets, even twenty years later. But it is not so much about theatre and its illusions, nor about the meanderings of fiction, so much as it is about the Human, of the simplest and most intimate kind. In this respect, words, those written by authors, those that actors appropriate, those that spectators allow to resonate within themselves, evoke nothing other than the questions we all ask ourselves, everyday, in our own interior monologues. Yes, of course, theatre is life. And even a little better than life, because it unveils grandeur in the best of situations and the worst, in the trivial and in our dreams. 5

6 In this sense, Maria Enders is neither Juliette Binoche nor myself. She is each of us through this necessity to revisit the past not to elucidate it, but rather to find the keys to our identity, which has made us who we are, and which continues to push us forward. She peers into the void and observes the young woman she was at age 20. At heart, she s still the same, but the world has changed around her, and her youth has fled youth as virginity, as discovery of the world. This does not come around twice. On the other hand, we never forget what our youth has taught us: this constant reinvention of the world, the deciphering of hypercontemporary reality and the price one must pay to be part of it. Giving every new time the urgency and danger of a first time. It is the confrontation between the past and present of a landscape that appeared to me as an ideal setting for a comedy or drama, depending on the perspective one chooses of an actress diving into the abyss of time, either out of professional or moral obligation, rather than desire. When we stare into this void, it does not reflect much aside from our own image, frozen in the absolute present. This snapshot is at the heart of Sils Maria. Maria Enders discovers herself to be diffracted into a thousand avatars that resonate in the virtual world of fame and detestation of modern media. This is where the border between the most intimate, the most pathetically banal, and virtual public space is erased. We look for it, but cannot find it. Perhaps it simply no longer exists. Is Maria Enders the young girl who once played Sigrid in Wilhelm Melchior s film, is she the adult, the mature woman that other people see her as being; or perhaps is she still one of the characters she embodied, or another of the faces that appear when one types her name in Google Images or on YouTube? Is there anything she can still cling to, if not the secret of her own privacy, the one place where time cannot leave its trace? The place where it can only flow, like the Cloud Phenomena of Maloja? Very early on, I thought of clouds, of the sky above the Engadin Valley, of how simultaneously immutable and moving a landscape can be, which is both intimidating and so human. It is strangely inscribed in time, and has witnessed all the beings who have roamed through it, merged with it, from every period. And who have experienced its dizzying heights. In 1924, at the dawn of cinema, Arnold Fanck, one of the pioneers of mountain photography, filmed the strange Cloud Phenomena of Maloja where mountaintops, clouds and the wind all mix together abstractly, evoking classical Chinese painting. He shot it in black and white, and the only form in which it now exists is a worn and scratched-up print. In a word, a memory of what might have been and onto which time, in turn, has engraved itself. It is nevertheless unsettling to feel an intimate and mysterious truth in these spaces, despite (or thanks to) the filters that separate us from them. They reveal themselves through a remote subjectivity, with nearly a century between us. Is this not the exact process of art, which reproduces the world but though a singular gaze, which takes away as much as it reveals, indifferently bringing to light the visible and invisible? 6

16 TRIVIA CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA THE MALOJA SNAKE On an early autumn day in the Engadin, one might be lucky enough to witness the strange snake of Maloja creeping between the mountains. This dreaded phenomena, generally signalling the arrival of bad weather, occurs when humid air rising from lakes in Italy transforms into a cloud that winds its way through the Maloja pass. It stretches, extends and flows into the valley, above Sils Maria, Silvaplana and all the way to St. Moritz. Then, in the early afternoon, another weather phenomenon indigenous to the Engadin inevitably appears: the Maloja wind. This flow of air is also baffling for meteorologists. Indeed, in the valley, daytime winds rise. This, however, is a daytime night-wind, or rather, a reverse wind. WILHEMM MELCHIOR ( ) In the 1960s, this Hamburg-born playwright chose Swiss nationality, setting the better part of his work in a Switzerland both real and imaginary. The renown of this Renaissance man (poet, essayist, botanist, filmmaker) runs deep in the Germanspeaking world. His nihilism and raw commentary on the society of the German economic boom earned him much enmity, but also cult status as an author for an entire generation. Very little of his work has been translated, and he is virtually unknown abroad, despite the fact he was widely talked about as potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year of his death. His filmography with Maloja Snake as his seminal work was recently rereleased as a DVD box set, allowing a whole new audience to discover his original, disturbing, and transgressive writing, which has lost none of its modernity or strange, fascinating power. 16

17 ARNOLD FANCK ( ) This mountain climber and doctor of geology became interested in cinema very early on. He first began with documentaries, shooting his first film in 1913 about the climbing of Monte Rosa, making him the German pioneer of nature, sports, and mountain films. In 1924, he shot Cloud Phenomena of Maloja. The film s original negative lasted 14 min. 30 seconds, but only now exists in the form of two identical, 9-minute long nitrate copies, one preserved in Austria, the other in Switzerland. Arnold Fanck began making fiction films in His cameramen were also two pioneers of high-altitude photography, Sepp Algeier and Hans Schneeberger. He is the inventor of the mountain film as a genre. In particular, thanks to the success of the films he directed between 1924 and 1931 starring Leni Riefenstahl, often with Luis Trenker as the love interest: The Holy Mountain (1926), The Big Jump (1927), Der weiße Stadion (1928), The White Hell of Pitz-Palü (1928), co-directed with G. W. Pabst and which earned him his first international success, Avalanche (1930) and White Ecstasy (1931). He first fled the rise of National Socialism and filmed in foreign countries. Including Japan. He then returned to Germany in 1939, became a cardcarrying member of the Nazi Party in 1940, and made two propaganda films. After the war, he was prohibited from ever filming again, and all his works were banned. It was the end of his career. He ended up penniless and worked as a forest ranger. 17

18 NIETZSCHE & SILS MARIA Late July, in an attempt to escape the heat, Nietzsche climbed towards the Engadin, the same place he had so enjoyed two years earlier. He chose a rustic house in the village of Sils Maria and, for one franc per day, had a room with a landlord, with the neighbouring inn provided his meals. Long before luxury hotels began sprouting, a great solitude pervaded these high places. When Nietzsche had the urge to chat, he would pay a visit to the local schoolteacher or priest, honest people who fondly remembered this German professor who was so learned, modest and kind. However, deep down, the German professor hid his true emotions from these good people. More than ever, he felt agitated. Inside, he was drifting towards unknown heights. [...] One afternoon, making his way through the woods of Silvaplana, he sat down next to a powerful rock formation now dedicated to his memory not far from a village called Surlej. The waters of Lake Sils run the length of this formation which, in its smaller proportions, holds the majesty of a summit, sharp like a peak. This is where Nietzsche found ecstasy. A text has given us the content of this ecstasy: Nietzsche had his vision of Eternal Return. This is how he explains it: the cosmos are animated by perpetual cyclical movement; the elements that compose them are finite; as is the number of combinations they are capable of; every moment is therefore bound to return. Here is Nietzsche, convalescent from long bouts of pain, sitting in the shadow of this rock, visited by ecstasy. In only a few days, this same Nietzsche, the same convalescent, will find himself in the same place, and will be revisited by the same ecstasy. This is the myth of Eternal Return. [...] Nietzsche wrote: The fact that everything returns is the extreme coming together of a world of becoming with a world of being: the summit of meditation. And the date of the note: Beginning of August 1881, in Sils Maria, 6500 feet above sea-level and much higher above all things human! Daniel Halévy, in Nietzsche, chapter on The Vision in Surlej 18

19 CHANEL Fashion house Chanel made its entry into film financing with Clouds of Sils Maria. Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel was quoted to have said: 'They turned to us because there was that bond. So we didn't start off saying we are going to finance it, because our contribution anyway is quite small. That wasn't the point. But we helped to make it possible for the film to be released in the way they wanted it to be done.' Chanel supplied actresses Juliette Bincohe, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz with clothes, jewelry and accessories. They also provided their make up and upped the budget so that director Olivier Assayas could shoot his film on beautiful 35mm instead of shooting it digitally. Pavlovsky: 'Chanel has always had privileged relationships with a number of artists and these relationships, beyond providing them with the means to carry out their projects, have often resulted in direct patronage of these artists. I think the project with Olivier Assayas is a perfect example of that.' Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart also rocked the red carpet of Cannes in Chanel looks. Kristen Stewart is currently the face of Chanel's Paris-Dallas collection. 19

20 DE INTERNATIONALE PERS Bewitching Kristen Stewart shines in her best role to date, in fearlessly intelligent drama Clouds of Sils Maria THE TELEGRAPH Contrasting styles between stars of two different generations make this Cannes competition title a rich study of actorly insecurity Binoche leaves audiences with the same exhilarating feeling here of having witnessed something precious and rare answering the challenge of Assayas script by revealing a character incredibly closer to her soul Clouds of Sils Maria marks his daring rejoinder, a multi-layered, femme-driven metafiction that pushes all involved including next-gen starlets Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz to new heights VARIETY Handsomely staged and played with conviction Assayas is a supple, playful and confident director THE GUARDIAN Olivier Assayas directs some of the best movies in contemporary French cinema [...] Clouds of Sils Maria follows suit INDIEWIRE Kristen Stewart flips a metaphorical middle finger to critics with a great performance at Cannes VANITY FAIR One of the strongest entries in the main competition THE NEW YORK TIMES Sparks fly between Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche LOS ANGELES TIMES 20

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